What’s the point of going through airport security when someone can build a shotgun out of materials purchased after getting though airport security clearance?

Self-proclaimed security researcher Evan Booth has been building guns made out of things like watch batteries, AXE body spray, magazines and condoms. He then shares his research on his personal website Terminal Cornucopia and on YouTube. He has even given each weapon a catchy name like Planned Parenthood, Fragguccino or, my personal favourite, ‘Murica.

But Booth’s fun little science experiments beg a very serious question: Why are we spending billions of dollars worldwide and letting guards invade our privacy at the airport when it’s still so easy to do harm on an airplane?

I spoke with him over Skype and asked him why he’s doing this and if he’s worried about getting arrested for his experiments.

Q: How did you learn to make these kinds of guns?

Evan Booth: I was always one to tinker with things. I would take everything apart in the house and kind of figure out how things work and that really didn’t change growing up. I would walk through hardware stores and wherever I was, actually, and look at stuff around me and think, “what can I do with this stuff?”

Like, if I was alone in here with all the stuff and someone is going to take a team of ten people and attack this building. Given an hour, what would I do to defend myself, what weapons would I build? That’s always been a fun thought exercise for me.

Q: That’s pretty intense. What was it about airport security that you felt needed addressing?

Evan Booth: Naturally when I walked into a terminal I was doing what I normally do and looking around and saying, “well, there’s some pretty interesting things in here I could probably make some weapons with.”

And I saw that airport security was trending up and how much it violates privacy and just how much scrutiny you go through to get into the terminal and there’s obviously a pretty big mismatch right there. We’re going to take our shoes off and throw away our water bottles and get inside and have all this stuff on hand to do whatever you want to. And that’s really why I decided to do this because it makes a really strong statement about the state of things currently.

Q: So what does that statement say? That anyone can make a weapon out of anything?

Evan Booth: A lot of people talk about the TSA [Transport Security Association] screening and refer to that as security theatre and really being something that makes people feel good about flying vs. something that actually makes flying safe. And talking about terrorism and threats of that magnitude, in the terminal is probably the worst place to catch someone with mal-intent and has it on that scale.

As a researcher, I try to stay pretty neutral in terms of things that I think need to happen. Really, my primary goal is to really very clearly state the problem and present it in a manner that people can pick up and use it to make logical decisions about.

Q: Sure, but how neutral is offering the ability and know-how to make guns, which violent people could get a hold of?

Evan Booth: The very unlikely scenario that someone is going to be suddenly motivated to kill people or commit a terrorist attack by watching videos on the Internet – it doesn’t start there. It starts some place a lot earlier or deeper or a combination of the two.

If they have those intentions they already have the information, because the information is out there is has been for years. Honestly the stuff that I’ve done kind of falls under the realm of common sense almost. I guess people who are familiar with explosives and weapons to a daily degree would kind of look at what I’ve done and say, “yeah, that’s pretty simple.”

Q: Yeah, it seems like pretty simple science experiments, but I guess we didn’t always have AXE body spray, which is one of the things that makes your guns go boom.

Evan Booth:There’s that, but there’s aerosols in general. Basically every airport has the Lysol disinfectant spray or whole bottles of spray-on suntan lotion. It’s anything under pressure really, so it’s not just AXE body spray. But, AXE smells the most bro-ish so it’s probably the worst offender (haha).

Q: You’re not worried at all about being arrested? I know that the FBI came in to visit you, but they’re just cool with you making weapons?

You know it’s really hard to guess what they’re thinking. I have made it a point to be extremely transparent with everything I’ve done and that includes when I first started I told them exactly what I was doing – that I’d be making weapons in my house and that I was going to report to them with whatever I found. And that’s exactly what I did.

Q: And they haven’t come back with anything to say to you?

Evan Booth: No, not really. The only point of contact I’ve had with the government was with the FBI when they dropped by that one morning in June. It was a friendly visit, so I guess that comforts me a little bit.

Q: I feel like people have been thrown into jail for much smaller things than making explosives, but at least you’re honest about it…

Evan Booth: At the end of the day, Joel, I like to think of myself as a man of principle and everything within me says that I’m doing this for the right reasons and I’m being safe about it and I think I’m being responsible about it, but at the end of the day if that warrants jail-time then I’m willing to fight that.

Q: You’re invested in this enough that you’d be willing to go to jail for it?

Evan Booth: I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I don’t think I should be jailed for this honestly. I don’t think I’ve done anything illegal and things that I have done that have been illegal or at least in a grey area have been in full disclosure with the government before I did it.

Q: What do you hope that the TSA learns from this and what do you hope society learns from it?

Evan Booth: Right now, there seems to be a fundamental incongruence between where we’re spending money with airport security now and what I’ve been able to demonstrate on the other side of airport security.

So, what that looks like, I’m not entirely sure, but honestly I think that if we went back to pre-9/11 level screening and things like that I don’t think we’d see a rise in terrorist activity and it would be a whole lot cheaper. That would free us up to spend money on things that actually do catch terrorists.

Q: You’ve said in interviews before that you heard people talking about it, but not actually doing anything like this. Where have you seen people talk about it?

Evan Booth: It’s the proverbial ‘yeah, can you believe they gave me a steak knife in the restaurant,’ or somebody would send you a picture of a giant glass mug and be like ‘I could kill someone with with this.’ Probably nothing as complex as what I’ve put together, but people certainly made comments to me about the chemicals that are available. Like when you think about those cleaning carts, you wouldn’t have to be a master thief to swipe a Comet or ammonia or whatever chemicals they got on that thing.

Q: Do you think the government could respond to something like this with increased security?

Evan Booth: I think that it could, just because of the way things are now, that seems to be the mentality in airports, but I think that would be stupid. At the end of the day, if someone is determined to build a weapon they are going to figure out how to do it.

So, what we need to do is focus our efforts on getting the intelligence required to find those people before they get into the airport at all.